Hi Scott,
If you have time to give some quick ideas on this one, ot would be greatly appreciated. Only thing is that this one is in 1922 and we need to shoot that on Saturday, so we’re under extreme time pressure. I’m basing what I’m writing on an episode we wrote last year when experimenting with B2W. If it’s possible on such short notice, maybe you can have look at it and ad your two cents… I know that’s it’s impossibly short notice, so I have the greatest understanding if it’s not possible, in any case thanks for volunteering!
Best,
Spartacus
Here’s the text I’m starting with:
We take them for granted today, the movie stars or TV stars or YouTube stars, and millions of people follow their lives. And by that I mean every single moment of their lives, but it wasn’t always so, and you can trace the rise of the cult of media personality directly to the explosion of film in the interwar years.
This happened- this new phenomenon- as a result of that explosion, and also the radio, phonograph, and newsreel explosion that really created the modern cult of personality that changed the way the world viewed those it loved and those it hated in those interwar years.
The world went from loving this guy…
…to following guys like this:
But how did we get there?
Cult of personality has been a part of humanity since the dawn of recorded history, but before the twentieth century, stars were only as famous as widely as their reputation could travel, they weren’t global super stars. Moving images and the cinema would create the global super star for better or for worse.
Carl Laemmle was one big figure that set that in motion. He was a German immigrant in America and the year was 1910. Motion pictures were by then an important part of everyday life even after just their brief existence. There were, actually, already movie stars, but nobody knew their names. Instead they were associated with the names of the fledgling film studios.
So the anonymous “star” Florence Lawrence was known as the “Biograph Girl” because she worked for the Biograph Film Company and she was wildly popular, though nobody knew who she was in real life. Her name was Florence Annie Bridgewood and she was, as you may imagine, not too happy about all of this, though she knew that as the Biograph Girl she was dependent on the studio. But she wanted people to know her as Florence Lawrence. Yes, I’m aware that it rhymes. Biograph Film refused.
Laemmle, on the other hand, was starting his own studio and needed a marketing gimmick to set him apart from the virtual monopoly of the other studios. He called it The Independent Moving Pictures Company but would later rename it Universal Studios, and when Lawrence left Biograph, he hired her and immediately began promoting her as HERSELF. As you might guess, people loved her even more when they knew her as Florence, and she loved movie life even more when they loved her as Florence.
Laemmle pioneered the spoof PR story for their first film together, “The Broken Bath”. He spread rumors of her death in a St. Louis streetcar accident, and then “resurrected” her at the film’s premiere a month later. People loved the drama off screen as much as on, and Carl and Florence had struck box office gold!
They would soon go their separate ways, but Laemmle hired another Biograpg Girl - Mary Pickford and created a new star in her, the biggest of all so far, as Lawrence moved on to her next studio, creating the game of studio musical chairs that still exists today.
As the First World War ended, this blew up to huge proportions. Entertainment was no longer enough; people wanted glamor, glitz, and gossip, and the studios in Hollywood, Berlin, London, and Paris were all too happy to acquiesce. The world was suddenly filled with movie stars to look up to, be shocked by, and to personally identify with. The global superstar was born.
The most famous of them all was soon Charlie Chaplin, and by the early twenties, he had created an independent studio by the stars and for the stars, together with amongst others Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Mary Pickford.
As a great actor and great filmmaker, Chaplin was a natural at the publicity game. It also helped that he led a tumultuous and scandalous love life, with everything from marriages to underage girls to well-publicized romantic relationship with other stars. One of them was Pola Negri. Between 1921 and 1924 they were in every paper, and in a way they were the Brangelinas of the early 20s.
But motion pictures didn’t only make stars out of actors and actresses; politicians quickly acquired a taste for the medium and used it for propaganda. In fact, one of the first widely distributed full color films was a 150-minute long propaganda piece celebrating the coronation of King George of England as Emperor of India way back in 1911.
However, it would take a new generation of politician to take it to the next level and combine film with propaganda. Enter Joseph Goebbels - Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Both Adolf Hitler and Goebbels were avid film fans and understood the extraordinary power of moving images. Once in power, they promptly engaged leading German filmmakers sympathetic to the Nazi cause to make propaganda for the party and its leader.
Their most effective film relationship was arguably with Leni Riefenstahl, who created three Nazi propaganda films. Two of them, Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens, would make movie history.
Riefenstahl was a filmmaking genius, introducing new ways of shooting and editing, She combined documentary filmmaking with emotion and pathos in unprecedented ways, and was so good at her job that one of her main opponents, John Grierson- the head of the Canadian Film Board during World War II and the maker of many anti-Nazi propaganda films- is said to have publicity kissed her feet in admiration when he eventually met her after the war.
Despite her films’ content, Riefenstahl continues to influence filmmakers to this day, and her body of work has influenced films like Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, and even Schindler’s List, a film with the exact opposite message of her own. Her support for the Nazi regime, however, destroyed her reputation forever. Postwar, it would take until she was over 90 years old before she would be allowed to complete another film, a three-hour underwater nature epic. To do so, she learnt how to scuba dive at 88 - becoming the oldest person to ever take a diving license. Completed in the late 1990s, it was again a masterpiece of filmmaking.
It wasn’t only willing admirers and sympathetic travellers who helped Goebbels, though. He appropriated the star system from the 1920s and put it to work for the Nazis. In 1933, together with Alfred Hugenberg, a German media mogul and the first Nazi Minister of Economics, he took control of the leading German film studio UFA. Parallel to creating propaganda, UFA continued to produce entertainment films, with the slight difference that they were now pro-Nazi and worked as subtle, invasive tools to spread the ideology of the party.
UFA produced and distributed in Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States, so stars from the whole world, either wittingly or unwittingly, were now working for the Nazis to promote their cause, and we’re talking serious paycheck stars like Hans Albers, Zarah Leander, and Pola Negri.
Negri had begun her career with UFA in the teens and early twenties. In 1935 she was brought back to Germany to star in the murder drama “Mazurka” for Tobis films, another Nazi label. The film was an instant hit and became one of Hitler’s favorite films. UFA saw their chance to reclaim their star and made her an exceptional offer.
Living in France, she worked for UFA, producing five films by 1938, but her public association with the Nazi media machine and Hitler’s fan-girl like adoration of her led to the French gossip magazine “Pour Vous” publicizing an alleged love affair between Pola and the Führer. Negri sued the magazine for libel and won. That lawsuit and the fact that she fled back to the US when the Germans invaded France saved her reputation.
So… Negri escaped any lasting damage from her Nazi collaboration. Others, like Zarah Leander or Hans Albers wouldn’t fare so well- after the war, most of them tried to distance themselves from their previous employers, but saw their careers largely destroyed or at least severely damaged. The Nazis were arguably the first to systematically appropriate celebrities for their cause, but they certainly weren’t the last. Today, the media industry has become so intertwined with politics that it’s hardly possibly to separate one from the other, and again and again we see media celebrities willingly, or even unwillingly, associate themselves with political causes for better or worse, and it raises the question what responsibility we have as role models.
https://community.timeghost.tv/t/help-urgent-call-for-volunteers/288/14